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Amazing Greats: Crazy great Jesus stories.
The Godfather of Contemporary Christian music -The John Michael Talbot story.
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If you talk to any of the current list of awesome Christian Music Performers, somewhere in the conversation, John Michael Talbot's name will come up.
In this awesome conversation between Amazing Greats guest host Joe Micheals and John he reveals how his young marriage fell apart as he became a Bible thumping legalistic Christian fanatic. Then hear how he flipped from an "anti-Catholic" to actually becoming a Franciscan monk who ultimately married a Catholic Nun and lives happily today in a monastic marriage. You can't make this stuff up! This man's story is truly amazing.
John Michael Talbot's music, too, took some major flips over the years, as he transitioned from Christian folk rock to a unique sound that was all his own. Music that his record company said would never sell became massively successful.
It's all here on AMAZING GREATS.
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Here is a complete Discography of all of his musical works: https://johnmichaeltalbot.com/complete-discography
Here are all of the 26 books written by John Michael Talbot
https://troubadourforthelord.net/store/ols/categories/books
"Amazing Greats" is a library of interviews with highly successful people who have amazing career and life stories and who share how God has impacted their journey. Hosted by broadcaster Ric Hansen & produced by Klem Daniels. Available on Apple, Spotify, iHeart, Google and our YouTube Channel.
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Hi there, and welcome to Amazing Greats as we talk with well-known actors, authors, athletes, and yes, musicians. Like the amazing and legendary John Michael Talbot. He is an incredibly talented musician that many consider his work to be foundational to the birth of contemporary Christian music. And he's a lot more than that, too. We'll find out his whole story right now with our host, our special guest host, Joe Michaels, as he delves deep into the life of John Michael Talbot. Take it away, Joe.
SPEAKER_03Well, thank you, Rick, and welcome to my very unceremonious warehouse studio, where a few days ago I had the opportunity to speak with John Michael Talbot. I say a few days ago because in rechecking the video, uh, John is coming through crystal clear, but my part uh, well, we had an operator air, and the operator was me. So you're just going to see a cheesy headshot when we ask the questions, but John will come through crystal clear on the answers. John Michael Talbot has been a Franciscan monk for over 40 years. Get this a multi-platinum recording artist. In fact, he has participated in over 57 albums, the author of 35 books, and the founder and spiritual director of the Little Portion Monastery. A lot to talk about. So please welcome John Michael Talbot.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Joe. And you've been you've been a uh uh uh one of the best friends of one of my best friends for a long time, and that would be Dan O'Neill with MercyCorps. And uh so we have been kind of intersecting for a long time with each other. So uh that's right.
SPEAKER_03And and Dan O'Neill's podcast, his his marvelous story is also available in this whole series of uh amazing greats. Well, in the long introduction, I want to get back to uh just dig a little deeper into uh some of these things that um you've accomplished and and are still very much part of your life. But I'd like to start. When was God first real in your life? When did God show up?
SPEAKER_01Well, my first memory, uh Joe, is when I was five years old, and I was out in the front yard in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. Uh, it was a day not unlike today, very windy. And I was looking up at the trees and the wind was blowing through the trees, and there had been a rain, and there was a little mud puddle out at the end of our driveway, and the water was moving. And we went to church. We were good Methodists, you know. My mom came from a line of Methodist preachers, and I just remember thinking that wow, God is real. That somehow, in the midst of all this, and I'm I'm looking out from my hermitage front door here, down on a lake, about a 20-acre lake, and you know, we have a forest and cleared acreage here, and it's just a gorgeous sight. And and in the midst of all this, somehow there's a creator and God, and Jesus is real, and the little pictures that I look at in Sunday school of Jesus with the lamb on his shoulder, and all somehow it's all real. And and that was the first encounter I had where God was real to me. And now in truth, that faded. You know, music first baseball, and then music was a very big part of my life. And music kind of took over at a very early age, uh, folk music and then uh rock music, and then I was in a band, country rock band, called Mason Prophet. And and then I saw the futility of all that very firsthand. So when I saw the futility of that, I began praying and I began reading all of these books about spirituality, Native American spirituality, Far Eastern spirituality, Taoism, Confucianism, you know, uh Buddhism, Hinduism, um, just anything I could get my hands on.
SPEAKER_03You were a seeker.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I was a seeker. I was reading about the you know, Plato and Aristotle and Socrates and the Greek philosophers, uh uh Kabbalah, and you know, just all these things. About the same time I was I had a revised standard Bible, and reading that, my grandmother, who was a Methodist minister's wife, had given me that that Bible and the red letters, man, they were jumping out. And and Jesus seemed to be able to say, with so few words, so much more than what all of the other great teachers were able to say. And the other great teachers had all this good stuff to say. I mean, it was great. I loved it, I was immersed in it. But Jesus was so simple and yet he said so much more. And I didn't understand it, I didn't understand theology or anything like that. So I I began praying. I was in the band, and and we come back from the you know, the gigs and the concerts, and I'd say, God, who are you? He or she or in it. I I don't care. As we say in Arkansas, I have no dog in the hunt. Just just tell me. And and uh one night in a hotel room somewhere in the Midwestern United States, God knows where it was, because they just all run together for me. Yeah, um, I had an experience with Jesus. And he didn't give me a great commission, he didn't tell me any of that. Uh I just knew, Joe, that I was loved. That's all I knew. I knew I was loved. And I and I I had lived a pretty pure life. The guys in the band, I was the youngest guy in the band, and they kept me from getting really involved in drugs or anything. I'd been drunk twice, you know, never did drugs, um, slept around a little bit, but not much. They really kind of kept me on the straight and narrow. Um but I'd sinned. You know, I had sinned, and I knew that I was forgiven.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I knew that Jesus I knew that Jesus forgave me, and so I started calling myself a Christian.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01So that was the next big experience for me.
SPEAKER_03So the so the power of forgiveness was really uh uh part of the dynamic that you maybe didn't find in some of the other religions?
SPEAKER_01Is that well it was there. I mean, you know, the Buddhist says that if you die thinking about him, you're uh forgiven all your sins. So it was there, and it was certainly I mean, it's there, yeah. Forgiveness is in the other religions, but for me, forgiveness came in the person of Jesus, yeah, very clearly. And and then later I read in scripture and I I tried to grapple with okay, what is this whole thing about the cross? And all these different preachers had all these different things they were saying, and quite honestly, a lot of it just confused me. Yeah, you know, what is this thing about the atonement and why does somebody have to shed their blood? And what is that? I mean, I mean, when's the when when's the last time we sacrificed an animal to forgive sins in the United States? I mean, come on, really? You know, we don't do any of that. So I I didn't get it. Um uh and then it finally hit me of Jesus loved me so much that he was willing to die for me. And what clicked was the notion of a police officer or a firefighter, and later this really came home with the Twin Towers, you know, uh Father Michael, for instance, going back in and saving people's lives and dying, you know. That was the kind of love that Jesus had. He was willing to give his life to save others. And then I you know, and and I got that before the Twin Towers, but I I understood it by understanding people in the service, people in in that kind of work, people that give their life so that other people can live. And that Jesus did that not just for a few people or if for his family, he did it for the whole human race.
SPEAKER_03So um what led you into the Catholic Church specifically and into the monastery beyond that?
SPEAKER_01Well, I I had in my Christianity, of course, I had met all these different kinds of Christians, and you know, and they said, Well, you know, you need to know your scripture, and you need to know, you need to memorize your scripture, which I did, and I studied, and in the process of doing all that, I did what many Christians do, and I had become a proverbial Bible thumper. You had a problem, I had a verse, right? Chapter and a verse, bang, bang, bang. And in the course of doing that, you can become very non-human. You become an encyclopedia of scripture rather than a human being. And I was married in in the band. It was a young marriage, it was a childhood marriage. I was only 17 when I got married. But my wife, I think, rightly looked at me and said, Well, this religion thing really stinks. Because you know, John, when you accepted Christ, that was actually good. And, you know, and now though, you're really not a nice guy. You just sit around and read scripture, and you know, everything is wrong with the world all the time, and you condemn people all the time, and you know, I'm out of here. So she she, for all practical purposes, she left. And um so I was left, you know, my family left. I lost my family. And then I began broken, I was just broken, and I began to go into all these, you know, I was by this time I'd gotten out of the band and gotten involved in Christian music. And I was traveling from church to church, you know, one domin denomination to another. And I began to see how they all disagreed with each other about who Christians were supposed to be, how we were supposed to worship, what were we supposed to do when we got when we got together, you know? Um, who was supposed to, as as as David Crosby used to say with Crosby, who's you know, in Crosby still Nash, who's supposed to be the boss of this bunch? You know, who's supposed to lead? Um what's the Lord's Supper? This one thing we're supposed to do that's supposed to be so important. What what's that all about? You know, how are we supposed to interpret scripture? Because somebody's got to interpret it because you can make it you can make it mean a thousand different things. And and we and we do. So um so somewhere along the line I stumbled onto this notion that, well, if the Bible came out of the early church, let's go back to the early church from which the scriptures came and see if we can't find at least a substantial agreement as to how they interpreted the scriptures, how they lived it, and then let's apply that to our situation today, you know, in a developed way, because we can't go back, you know, to the year one or two or three hundred. You know, we don't live then, and uh see what we come up with. So I I just, you know, I bought some books and I went to the library and started reading, and you know, these books have been translated, Ignatius of Antioch and you know, Clement of Rome and Ignatius, you know, uh the Didic and or the teaching of the Twelve Apostles, Polycarp and you know, Irenaeus of Lyon and Justin Martyr, and just guys like this, you know. So I started reading and I was shocked because what I discovered was the primitive expression of what today we would call the Catholic Church. And you know, you need to understand, Joe, that I didn't want to be a Catholic, you know. One, that's not what I thought I was gonna find. I wasn't looking to be a Catholic. Uh I I had argued a lot of people out of the Catholic Church and in my short time as a Bible thumping Christian. Uh heck, I didn't even like Catholics all that much. And by the way, Joe, I'm I'm still kind of working on that one. And uh uh, but the Lord gave me what I know now is called a locution, which is just a little still small voice inside of you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And that's a work of the Holy Spirit. And uh, and the word was, I want you to be a Catholic.
SPEAKER_03We're talking with John Michael Talbot, Franciscan monk and award-winning music artist. More on amazing greats.
SPEAKER_01I was first received into the church in 78, and shortly thereafter, I became a Franciscan hermit in what then was called the uh secular Franciscan order as an isolated tertiary. And then people began coming. I built a little hermitage in the woods, and people began showing up. That was not my plan. Uh, I did have a vision for community, but I didn't know how to do that. And the Lord told me to, you know, to uh actually said, find these monks and they'll show you how to do it, and they did. I just hung out with these guys and they were hilarious. Franciscans were hilarious. Really? Oh, they were just hilarious. I mean, they did stuff like, you know, uh I I had been so hung up as a Bible thumper. You know, I was so legalistic, you know. Uh never went to movies. They said, you never go to movies? They well, we're Franciscans, and we go to movies like every other week. I said, really? They said, yeah, we go to the matinee, it costs a dollar. Of course, this was a long time ago.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01They said, we go to clean movies, we don't go to dirty movies, but we go to movies over, it's down the street, you know. And um so they said, come with us. So okay, I'll go with you. So dollar, the dollar matinee on Saturday, and we go in this funky little movie house. And I said, Well, aren't we gonna like go over and get some sodas or something, you know, get some pop and you know, maybe popcorn? And one of the guys, Father Maury, he says, Oh no, and he opened up his coat like this, like he's selling illegal watches or something. And he had he had Cokes and potato chips. And I said, Maury, Maury, you're not supposed to do that. He says, Oh, I'm not gonna pay those prices. That's immoral, right? These guys were just hilarious. Um, so they taught me how to have fun. Uh, you know, you get a phone call in the middle of dinner, right?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Sitting at the table. And anytime any guy got a phone call and you took it, of course, back then you didn't have cell phones, in the middle of a meal, they would penalize you by taking your plate and s and passing it around the table, and every guy would take just a little bit, and you'd come back and your plate would be empty. But you could never tell who did it because every guy had taken just a little. It was like it was like a frat house in that regard. It was just so they they taught me how to laugh. They taught me how to have fun, they taught me how to laugh again because my life was I had I had lost all my joy. I had lost all my joy, and they taught me how to laugh, Joe. So anyway, I I I'm off the topic probably, but no, that's the no, this is great.
SPEAKER_03That that was uh I I love that that story. And and you know, I mean the the perception of what a monastery is in today's world, I mean, it's such a mystery. I mean, for you to just open up that little uh, you know, door doorway to uh what life is like there is revealing, and and and uh I appreciate that.
SPEAKER_01No, monasteries are joyful places. There and and monastics, because monastics, and I'm a married monastic now. I'm actually married.
SPEAKER_03How'd that happen? Because you go in as a celibate, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I go in as a celibate, and I lived that way for seven years, and I'm very, very happy. Uh Viola comes in. We had gotten it all messed up in our community. She had been a nun for 28 years. She comes in, she helps get the sisters going. Uh, she she transfers over into our community. We're the founder and founders, we're spending too much time together, we're not doing anything unholy, but we're spending you know, praying together, right? Yeah, and we can't say go and do likewise because if the younger people are gonna do this, they're gonna sin. Just pure and simple.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01So and it's supernatural. I mean, we're thinking we're together like for 20 minutes and we're together like for two hours, and all we're doing is praying. So this kind of stuff goes on. So anyway, we we pray this through and we talk to our bishop, and we end up in a monastic marriage. So that's what we share now. And it's she's been the light of my life and just an absolute joy. But in so we have what's called an integrated monastery. We have celibate monks, celibate sisters, singles who either have, because of past responsibilities, they have private possessions more than what the celibates have, or they can be open to marriage, and then we have families. So it's an interest, we call it integrated monasticism.
SPEAKER_03So what vows are generally taken?
SPEAKER_01The same ones poverty, chastity, and obedience, but in different ways. The monks and the sisters take them in traditional ways. Poverty, no personal possessions, chastity is celibate chastity, and obedience means, you know, uh uh basically the community is your primary adult family.
SPEAKER_03Now you're the spiritual father of the little portion monastery in Arkansas where you are.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03What what does that mean, spiritual father?
SPEAKER_01Well, a monastery becomes a spiritual family. So again, with the celibates, this is their primary spiritual family. And for the same thing is true with the singles. Now, with the with the celibate or with the families, excuse me, we recognize the sacr the family is sacrosanct. So I don't barge into the sacredness of the family and specifically of the husband and wife relationship unless asked to enter into that. I can deal with the external aspect of obedience, for instance, regarding, you know, we need you to do this job or that job, or gee, we would like you to go on mission here or go on mission there. But I don't get involved in the internal workings of the husband and wife relationship unless asked to do so. And more times than not, I'm when asked to do so, I'm going to refer them to an outside source for pastoral counseling or that kind of thing.
SPEAKER_03John Michael Talbot, award-winning artist, music artist, and author of 35 plus books. We're speaking to him from the Little Portion Monastery in Arkansas. Here's more on Amazing Greats with John Michael Talbot. Can we go back just a little bit? Uh, I'd like to just talk about how your music has evolved from country rock into doing these marvelous classical pieces with wonderful guitar playing, classical guitar, and and your choral arrangements on some of your earlier albums. Um it just seems like such a transition from playing the banjo in a country rock band. I mean, I know you played guitar too, but uh to to where your musical direction has has gone and continues to go. Can you talk a little bit about that?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, when I when I made the change and went into the Hermitage in 1978, I gave up everything. And one of the things I gave up was music. When I did I did a record called The Lord's Supper, which was kind of a contemporary set. Of the mass, and I very specifically did not put bass and drums on it. I could have. It it easily could have gone that direction in the genre. And I decided not to put bass and drums and you know do it as a rock setting.
SPEAKER_04Right.
SPEAKER_01And instead, we put orchestra on it, and we put a contemporary choir that was charismatic onto it. And I thought, well, okay, I'm done. That's my swan song. Now I'm going to be a hermit. And I gave it to the record company, and they said, Well, we can't sell this thing. It's a Catholic Mass. And Billy Ray Hearn, who was the president of Sparrow Records, I remember it very distinctly. He said, How am I supposed to sell a Catholic Mass to a bunch of Southern Baptists? And I said, I don't know, Billy Ray. It's my last record. I'm checking out. Just do whatever you can. And I walked away from it. And about six months later, I got a call from Billy Ray, and it was the biggest record in Christian music that year. So I it was an unexpected thing. You know, I didn't expect it to be a hit. He didn't expect it to be a hit, and it was. So I had extra material from it. Uh originally it was supposed to be a double record called Mass and The Painter, Mass and the Key of D major. So I had this extra stuff, and I did a similar setting with it, except my brother and I were the choir, and we put a record out called The Painter. And that was also a big hit. Wonderful album. Yeah, and that was just me and my brother going in, and literally, Joe, we just goofed around. Oh man. We were just goofing around.
SPEAKER_03It's a fabulous album. I've uh it's played a lot uh here in the Seattle area.
SPEAKER_01And it's it was just, you know, it was me, the leftover stuff that didn't get on the Lord's Supper because they were afraid to put out a double record. So we finished it up and put it out, and it was a big hit. And then they said, Well, you want to do another one? I said, Well, I don't know. So I said, I've been sitting, I built this hermitage and I've been putting the Psalms to music, and I I'm through with steel string because you know I don't want to do this aggressive stuff. So I bought a classical guitar and I didn't know how to play it. I took a few lessons and and um very contemplative.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And and and I played a demo to the record company, and I said, What do you think? And they said, Oh, this is awful. I said, What's the matter with it? And they said, Well, there's there's too much space in it. Americans aren't gonna know what to do with it. There's there's too much space between the notes. That's what they told me. Too much space between the notes.
SPEAKER_03I think they told Mozart that at one point, didn't they?
SPEAKER_01I don't know. So so I said, Well, let me just finish it up. So we did. It was the producer, uh, Dan Collins, he he thought it was so bad he wouldn't put his name on it.
SPEAKER_02Oh.
SPEAKER_01So so we put it out. And it's music that came out of My Hermitage. It sold three times more than the Lord's Supper of the Painter combined. And the title of that album is Come to the Quiet.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01Because there's a lot of quiet in it between each note. And and so it changed the way I made music. So essentially, everything I had been trained to do, which was you know, bluegrass, folk, rock, country rock, that's what I had been set up to make in my whole musical training.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_01That was all gone.
SPEAKER_03Such a jump. I mean, it just amazed me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Well, it amazed me.
SPEAKER_03The sophistication of, I mean, you know, the country rock is great, but the sophistication of the classical approach uh talk a little bit about the uniqueness of your sacred music and the overall um uh genre of of what is heard in churches.
SPEAKER_01Well, it doesn't fit anywhere. Hey, I don't fit anywhere. I mean, this we're we're our community is unique. There's about ten communities like ours in the world, period. Yeah. So it's unique. We're the only community of our kind in North America that's in you know indigenous to the United States in North America. But my music, as far as I know, it doesn't fit into the Christian contemporary world at all, and to to Hill song or Bethel music or anything like that. Now they they consider stuff like Lord's Supper as kind of foundational in what they do, but Come to the Quiet and Troubadour the Great King, and you know subsequent records that I did that sold millions of copies, you know. They I don't even think they know it exists. So it it's not part of that. And it's it's spilled over into liturgical music in the Catholic Church and in liturgical churches. And I've done masses. Uh, you know, you mentioned some of the choral pieces that I've done, you know, Light Eternal and and so on and so forth. I did uh Regathering and I've done settings of the Mass. I've done some settings recently of Eastern Catholic uh liturgical pieces like the Trisogion hymn and the cherubic hymn and things like that. But uh I'm not a liturgical musician. I love liturgy, I've studied liturgy, but I'm not a liturgical musician. I don't fit into that crowd. I just don't.
SPEAKER_03We're speaking with John Michael Talbot from deep inside his monastery in Arkansas here on Amazing GRETES. Here's more with John.
SPEAKER_01My brother lives in Fresno, and he and he uh produces local talent there, and he's working on a project of a bluegrass quartet of two sets of of twins, not identical, not identical twins, called the Gilly Girls. Now they're they come out here and play at Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, and they travel around and do county fairs and stuff like that. They're really good. Uh it's a bass, a guitarist, a fiddle, and a mandolin, and these vocals, you know, four girls who are siblings.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Their vocals are just like there's something about brothers and and sisters singing together.
SPEAKER_01It's a thing, and they're good. And he sent me uh a demo of them, and he says, What do you think? And I said, It's really good, but a couple of the songs need a banjo. Ah. And he said, Great, when are you gonna play? And I went, play. I haven't, you know, I haven't played that thing in 10 years, Terry. He's I said, Call Herb Peterson, you know, with Chris Hillman, or you know, uh, I know Ricky Skaggs, you know, call Ricky, he'll get somebody to play on it. And he says, No, he says, I told the the father of the Ghillie Girls that, you know, you're my brother and he wants you to play. So I the last two days I've actually been rehearsing two of their songs. I'm gonna play on that.
SPEAKER_03Do you play uh five-string banjo or the Irish four-string?
SPEAKER_01Five, five-string. Yeah, five string. So uh I'm actually having fun playing the banjo, but it it it's a different thing, Joe. Uh the classical guitar is very uh it gets you into a very multi-dimensional place. I don't know how to describe it. Five-string banjo is like being a fast draw. It's very two-dimensional. It's like that. And uh I knew we were gonna do this interview today, and I I was afraid I was gonna only talk in like zeros and ones. Because I was all five-string banjo the last day and a half. So but it's actually been fun. It is a fun instrument, you know. Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So I still have to if you've used it uh occasionally on like uh oh um I know it I know it's uh you you did a whole banjo thing on one of your albums, an instrumental Irish Yeah. I uh I I jig, I think, or something.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. I I won't tell you the whole story, but people have been pretty, pretty uh complimentary of my banjo skills. And um um I can still pull it out of the closet and my chops come back in about 24 hours, and you know now I'm not I'm not up with the guys that are playing nowadays, but I love to get into the to really odd tunings.
SPEAKER_03Oh really?
SPEAKER_01They carry the they carry the drones and and carry kind of that notion of hill music, which goes back really to carrying the the whole notion of the pipes that come from Ireland and Scotland.
SPEAKER_03So do you play guitar in Dad Gad and some of these other tunings?
SPEAKER_01No.
SPEAKER_03No.
SPEAKER_01And I'm uh there there was a country artist who got up and he says, I he says, I won't I want to thank um God, I want to thank uh my wife, and I want to thank the key of D. He tuned his guitar a lot. So anyway.
SPEAKER_03Um talk a little bit about uh your itinerant ministry.
SPEAKER_01Oh, yeah. Well, that really came about when I was reading about the life of Francis a lot, and I would, you know, giving up everything and just heading off on foot. And and um I would talk to Franciscans about it, and they go, Oh, you can't do that today, you know, that can't be done. And and I kept thinking, well, why not? Why not? Why not? And I was younger, by the way. I was in my forties. Um and and finally one day I thought, you know, I'm just gonna try it. So we live in the mountains in a little valley, it's a little bowl where there's a lake and stuff. And and I just head out and I started walking. And I ended up in Little Rock, Arkansas, about 150 miles away. And by the time I got there, there were a bunch of about you know, about 20 people with me. A lot of them came back and joined the community.
SPEAKER_03So really yeah. So did you just play along the way? Did you on street corners or in churches?
SPEAKER_01Churches, I would show up at a church and um say, you know, we're here, can you put us up? And can we, you know, I'll sing at night and I'll visit your parishioners during the day, and I go knock on doors and I'd say, you know, I'm over here at Saints Such and Such. And um so so I actually discovered that it is still possible. And then I adapted that, that when I would go out and do concerts on Saturdays especially, I could go out and do door-to-door ministry and teach people how to do that in Catholic churches in a way that wasn't weird. You know, or basically you could basically go out and and knock on doors and say, you know, we're from the local Catholic parish and we're just out in the neighborhood saying hello, and do you have any needs that you'd like us to pray for?
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_01We're not trying to get you to come to church, we're not selling anything, we're not, you know, we're just and I've been thrown off porches, you know. Yeah. I've been invited into homes, and and I've actually helped reconnect people with their churches, sometimes Baptist, sometimes Methodist churches.
SPEAKER_03Sure.
SPEAKER_01And I've helped get people back to their Catholic churches just by being present in neighborhoods. I've gone I've gone in in Los Angeles, I've I've gone through areas where you know it's gang areas, and walked right up through through gang areas where they're doing drug deals and just been nice to the guys and and brought Jesus to them, and they I've never been hurt.
SPEAKER_03So that's that's so awesome you have the courage to do that.
SPEAKER_01Well, I did. Yeah, well. I did in my 40s and 50s. I um I don't know whether I still but itinerant ministry, that kind of ministry is possible. You have to be wise and you have to you have to really be under the anointing of the spirit. And I will tell you this I never want to do it. It's not the kind of ministry that you ever as a matter of fact, you kind of dread it.
SPEAKER_03You feel called to do it though, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but but you don't want to do it. Yeah, and but once you do it, you experience a liberation that you can't get any other way. That's the only thing I can say about it. I've never experienced that kind of freedom anywhere else.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01And you just go out, you have no agenda, you don't know where you're gonna stay, you know. Yeah, you don't know what you're gonna do, you don't know what ministry you're gonna do. You know, I put a guitar over my back and a little knapsack and and head out on foot. And it's it's just a wonderful liberating thing. And I've done it several times in my life, and it's powerful.
SPEAKER_03We're talking with John Michael Talbot, Franciscan monk and award-winning music artist. More on Amazing GRETES.
SPEAKER_01When I got away from doing concerts, pay concerts, where I had a team and a, you know, a crew and a bus and that kind of thing, and this and I would just go off in our minivan. As a matter of fact, I'm doing it here at the end of next week. You know, and I go out in a minivan and a little bose system, and I'm doing free will offering concerts in churches that want to get people back together after COVID, and we're gonna see who comes. It's we're expecting it to be not huge, you know, probably three or four hundred people. Though some of them will social distance, and we're gonna do free will offering concerts, and it'll be a lot of fun. And we're gonna go around the diocese here in our diocese in Arkansas. I'm gonna do a couple of things over in Oklahoma, and I'm gonna do the I'll do the cathedral over in Amarillo, Texas. Um, a little short run for a couple of weeks and see how it goes.
SPEAKER_03So, what else is in the future for you, John?
SPEAKER_01Oh, golly. Um, I'm I'm working on an EP and uh I've been talking to a couple of arrangers, some pretty pretty impressive ones. I don't know whether God wants me to do that yet. Uh I did right before COVID. I had been out doing these itinerate ministries, but I had gotten back into coast-to-coast ministry, and I won't go into the gory details, but you know, at my age, I ended up in the hospital every time I went out on the road. Really? Uh yeah, I my body just could not cash the checks I was writing, essentially is the way I would describe it. Yeah. And and the Lord kept saying, Stop. And I go, slowing down here, Lord, slowing down. He'd say, Oh, no, stop. And I'd say, Slowing it down, slowing it down. No, stop. And uh finally we were just about four feet from a fatal uh crash between a truck and a semi-trailer on I-40 uh between Memphis and and Little Rock. And it really shook me up. And I said, got it. And then COVID hit. So for the next two years until now, not a concert. I've just been here doing some music. Uh done three books, working on a fourth one. And Hermitage of the Heart has come out. I've done the Inner Room School of Spirituality, which is an online spirituality school. People can sign up for that, and it's been successful, and that's been going on during COVID. Uh the um, I have an I have the uh a book called uh Hermitage of the Heart that is currently out, and that's a Linton retreat that we're doing. It's 40 days, morning and evening, that people can sign up for. I'm also that's based on the spirituality of St. Romuel, the founder of the Comaldales. They have a wonderful hermitage in Big Sur, California, and it's a really, really neat retreat that I did, and that's I did it from here in our Hermitage, but I I love the Comaldolese spirituality. Another one that's gonna come after that on the Carthusian spirituality from the 11th century. Again, another uh founder of a hermitage in Europe. So that's another retreat that we're doing, and then I'm I'm working on another book on uh on Mary for all Christians, and that's gonna be called Holy Is His Name, based on one of my probably one of the most requested songs that I've ever written called Holy Is His Name.
unknownRight.
SPEAKER_01So that's all happening and more music, and we'll see what God does after that.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. Um give your web address where people can order books and uh tell me that. And I know that uh I wanted to mention that signatures written, uh co-written with Dan O'Neill is kind of the story of your ministry and well, the story of your life, basically, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01It is, and we're updating that because it's out of date right now, so we're trying to bring it up to speed, and we may go back to the original title, Troubadour for the Lord. Right. Um, if and and that we have those chapters kind of ready to go when we update it. So that's that's in the works, and that might be an update. The the web address is www.johnmichaelbot.com.
SPEAKER_03John Michael Talbot, award-winning artist, music artist, and author of 35 plus books. We're speaking to him from the Little Portion Monastery in Arkansas. Here's more on Amazing Greats with John Michael Talbot. Well, listen, we need to wrap up in just a moment, but before we do, I'm just wondering what your concerns are about the church today and about the future. Uh, we see megachurches, you know, doing really well. We see the Catholic Church um changing slowly. Um what what are your concerns as you you think?
SPEAKER_01Well, boy, I I think the megachurches are uh they're good at what they do, but I honestly think megachurches are more of an outreach and not a church. They lack some of the essential characteristics of a traditional church as understood as a church by the early church. They aren't, they don't have apostolic succession, they don't really focus on the sacraments, and they don't really preach apostolic preaching. What they really are is good Christian entertainment in terms of music, with good uh motivational preaching, with scriptures thrown into that motivational preaching, and they do reach people who would not darken the door of a traditional church. So I think there are good evangelistic outreach insofar as that goes, it's fine. Um so I think that's the megachurch movement or the big box church movement. The Catholic Church is, of course, coming back not only after COVID, but coming back after the sex scandals. I think it's going to take us yet another decade to fully win the confidence of our culture, quite frankly. And we do that by bishops getting the smell of the sheep. We in our diocese have, you know, a bishop who's a pastor. You know, he drives himself, he's he's approachable, he's a good guy, he hangs out with people. You know, it's gonna take that kind of bishop. The guy who's gonna, you know, he's gonna take off the fancy clothes and just be with the people. Uh, that's gonna get back. And I think, you know, perhaps uh You know, Father Joseph Ratzinger was correct in 1969 when he said the church is going to lose its status and we're going to go back to worshiping in in people's homes. And we will rediscover when we do that what it is to be really Catholic again. And it may take that, where the church will be persecuted, uh, the church will be small, our bishops will be amongst their people in shoulder-to-shoulder ways, and there'll be pastors among their people. Now I hope it doesn't come to that, but it very well could. You know, he said we'll lose our property. We're going to lose our property.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, politically we see, you know, how how things are changing and how the church just gets marginalized more and more, seemingly.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And so I'm not hoping we go there, but we could. And you know what? The the church grows from the seed of the blood of the martyrs, and martyrdom takes on various forms. So marginalization is a form of martyrdom, in a sense. So I I'm not at all afraid that you know the church is not gonna stop. Uh the church has stopped in some cultures for various periods of time, but she's always come back. So I'm hopeful about the future, Joe. Um the church is forever. The church is forever, and the Holy Spirit is forever, and Jesus is forever. So we just have to stay focused on the things that matter and never, never are my one of the great one of our great visitators used to always tell us this at the monastery. Never get discouraged. Never give in to discouragement. Always stay focused on the positive, the good things. And you know, things come and go in our culture, things come and go even in the church. Pastors come and go, bishops come and go, popes come and go. Jesus is the same yesterday, forever, uh, today, and forever, and we stay focused on him, and you'll be fine. So that's what I tell people. And I think if we do that, we're gonna be just fine. We'll end up standing on our feet.
SPEAKER_03John, that's that that's such a great way to kind of close this conversation. I wish wish we could talk longer because uh you're uh there there's such a depth there of uh experience that that you've covered over the years of your life. And uh lots of places to go, but I know that there's lots of resources at your website, johnmichelbot.com, right?
SPEAKER_01Uh yeah, johnmicheltalbot.com. And if you want to find out about our community, you can go to littleportion.org.
unknownOkay.
RicThanks, John.
SPEAKER_01Thank you, Joe. You're wonderful.
RicWell, you ask any Christian artist today, and they'll agree that this guy, John Michael Talbot, is a musical genius, and his early work paved the way for the many contemporary Christian artists that are there today. Thanks for joining us for this episode of Amazing Greats. Your help in spreading the word by hitting like and sharing with a friend is pivotal to our getting these inspiring stories to as many people as possible. Thanks to Joe for hosting, and Clem Daniels, as always, who edits and produces every single episode of Amazing Greats. God bless.
